Philip Jones Griffiths’ daughter on the Vietnam War photographer

An armed American soldier tries to talk to a Vietnamese woman holding her child. Photo: Philip Jones Griffith

This ariticle originally appeared at BBC Wales News

By Caleb Spencer

The work of freelance photographer Philip Jones Griffiths was seen as instrumental in turning the tide of American public opinion against the Vietnam War. Ten years on from his death, one of his daughters has told of what motivated him to capture such trauma.

Her father Philip Jones Griffiths was considered one of the great photojournalists of his era, capturing the true horror of conflict while covering the Vietnam War following the US military intervention between 1966 and 1971.

His photographs and observations – published in his seminal 1971 book Vietnam Inc – gave a haunting and disturbing insight: mothers and children held at gunpoint, babies covered in blood, faces filled with terror and soldiers struggling to survive in often hostile territory.

As the American author and political commentator Noam Chomsky said: “If anybody in Washington had read that book, we wouldn’t have had these wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.”

A terrified mother and her relatively calm son during the battle for Saigon, 1968 Photo: Philip Jones Griffith

Growing up, Griffiths’ two daughters were not shielded from the reality of their father’s job.

“When me and my sister were growing up, he absolutely made pains to make sure we knew about the work he was doing,” said Katherine.

“He never tried to shelter us from it. I mean, maybe in the finer details of the grisly truth of war, but in terms of what was happening, I think he felt a responsibility to let his daughters know what was happening.”

“He had an affinity with the people of Vietnam and I think he saw a lot of similarities between the Welsh and Vietnamese kind of being these smaller, more village-based communities, having a kind of imperial yoke put upon them,” Katherine explained.

Philip Jones Griffiths’ journey to Vietnam

A mother cradles her son during a US search and destroy operation at Quang Ngai in 1967. Photo: Philip Jones Griffith

After working for his local newspaper, the Rhyl Leader in the 1950s, he began working part-time for the Manchester Guardian before joining the Observer in London as a full-time freelancer in 1961.

Following a spell working in Africa he joined the prestigious Magnum Photo Agency and moved to South East Asia, where he covered the Vietnam War from 1966 -to 1971.

Many of Griffiths’ photographs focus on the effect the war had on the civilian population.

Speaking to the BBC in 2005 he said: “I wanted to show that the Vietnamese were people the Americans should be emulating rather than destroying.”

As well as showing the horrors of the military invasion, his images also captures moments of compassion from the American soldiers.

His colleague at Magnum, Henri Cartier-Bresson, said of his work: “Not since Goya has anyone portrayed war like Philip Jones Griffiths.”

Following the Vietnam War Griffiths worked in more than 120 countries including Grenada following the US invasion in 1983.

Perhaps paradoxically, Griffiths spent much of his adult life living in the USA although he had returned to London

She said despite his work taking him around the world, Griffiths never lost touch with his roots.

“Although I grew up in London, he made sure me and my sister went to Wales every summer and hang out with our Welsh cousins,” she said.

“He always joked that he was a unique Welshman because he didn’t drink beer, he didn’t play rugby and he didn’t sing.”

A Vietnamese youth being arrested by a soldier of the US 9th Division on the outskirts of Saigon. Photo: Philip Jones Griffith

A mortuary vehicle in Vietnam, 1967. Photo: Philip Jones Griffith

And he felt it was important that his work should stay in Wales, with his archive now in permanent residence in the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth.

William Troughton, who curated the exhibition at the National Library, said: “Philip Jones Griffiths didn’t consider himself a traditional war photographer.

“He was interested in showing the effects and injustices of war on ordinary people – his book ‘Vietnam Inc.’ had a major impact and is considered a classic.”

US soldiers shepherding a group of captured suspected enemy in Quin Hon in 1967. Photo: Philip Jones Griffith

And Randy Kennedy, in his New York Times obituary, said Griffiths’s “harrowing” pictures “helped turn public opinion against the war”.

“And so for us at the charity that he started, it is our aim to promote that and inspire the young people, particularly the young people of Wales, that you can actually go out and you can help stop a war.

“I think that is incredibly powerful, and that is probably his enduring message in all this.”

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Toward an honest commemoration of the American War in Vietnam

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The Full Disclosure campaign is a Veterans For Peace effort to speak truth to power and keep alive the antiwar perspective on the American war in Viet Nam — which is now approaching a series of 50th anniversary events. It represents a clear alternative to the Pentagon’s current efforts to sanitize and mythologize the Vietnam war and to thereby legitimize further unnecessary and destructive wars.

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Philip Jones Griffiths’ Viet Nam

This Month in History: 1969

February First trial of draft resistors known as the Buffalo 9. Around 150 University of Buffalo students and faculty picket the U.S. Courthouse, chanting “Free the Nine — The Trial’s a Crime”. Defendants argue that it was necessary to resist an “immoral, illegal, racist, politically insane war on the Vietnamese people.” Charges include assaulting federal officers, as well as draft evasion. The jury is unable to reach a verdict on several of the defendants but Bruce Beyer is convicted and receives a three-year sentence. Beyer later goes to Canada and then Sweden to help organize fellow resistors and deserters.

February Fort Gordon – Pfc. Dennis Davis editor of (the antiwar newspaper) Last Harass) is given an undesirable discharge.

February 14 The first three of 27 Gls charged with mutiny at the Presidio are found guilty and sentenced to 14, 15, and 16 years at hard labor by a court martial at the San Francisco Presidio stockade (see entry for October 14, 1968). By this time, three of those charged (Blake, Mather, and Pawlowski) had escaped to Canada. On appeal, the long sentences for mutiny were voided by the Court of Military Review in June 1970, and reduced to short sentences for willful disobedience of a superior officer. Rowland, for example, was released in 1970 after a year and a half imprisonment. See The Unlawful Concert by Fred Gardner for a fuller description of the case, as well as entry for October 14, 1968.

February 20 Tacoma – the Shelter Half coffee house’s business license is revoked. See October 1968 entry.

February 22-23 NLF attack 110 targets throughout South Vietnam, including Saigon.

February 25 36 U.S. Marines are killed by NVA (PAVN or VPA) who raid their base camp near the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).

2016 National Book Award Finalist, Viet Thanh Nguyen:

“All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory . . . . Memory is haunted, not just by ghostly others but by the horrors we have done, seen, and condoned, or by the unspeakable things from which we have profited.”